by A. R. Moxon
“But the guy’s still in the Cracker Box?”
“He claims to be hiding from the promiscuous probing of the cardinals.” Boyd seems oddly nervous—or rather, he seems nervous in a different way; he’s trying even harder than usual to talk like a college professor.
“What else?”
“First of all, the Father plans on moving him out of the Wales.”
Donk scowls; this they already know. “Yes, but when?”
For the first time, Boyd’s confidence drops. “That…was not determined in my presence. If I had to wager, I’d guess tomorrow night.”
“Why?”
“This is an extraordinarily nervous fellow. He’s afraid to leave. He was asking for specific conditions for his escape.”
“Julius’ll be coming to us for help, then,” Bailey says. “Easy. We wait for him to come to us before you go.” Donk narrows his eyes. She’s so transparently looking for a reason to avoid risk. Boyd pipes up.
“He’s not coming to us.”
“Who, then?”
Boyd shakes his head “It’s somebody he visited this morning, however—that much I know. He promised his frightened young friend it would be the next thing he did.”
“Tell me about the visit, then. What happened there?”
“Didn’t witness it.”
“What?”
“He ran out of the Island,” Boyd says, hands raised in supplication. “And he kept running. And he kept running.”
“You lazy turd.”
“I ran as hard as I could,” Boyd protests. “Have you ever tried to hold to Father Julius’s pace? It can’t be done.”
“I shouldn’t have sent a weakling, is what you’re saying.” Donk can’t bring himself to say it like he means it. Boyd’s clearly put in the effort. His clothes are sweat-drenched. Anyway, it’s clear who; Julius is doing what any rich boy does when the kettle gets hot. He’s running to his money.
“It would have been so delightful if you hadn’t sent this particular weakling,” Boyd says. He collapses onto the uncluttered portion of the billiard table. “I’m resting now.”
Donk considers for a moment, grabs his bag. “So be it. Nothing’s changed. It only means I need to go immediately.”
“And without any backup,” Bailey says. “I can kill you myself right now. Saves time.”
Donk, ignoring this, looks to Boyd. “Anything else?”
Boyd, rising from his supine position, pauses to savor the effect he knows he will have. “Indeed. One other thing. Father Julius’s flickering man and your ‘new boss?’ I know their names.”
* * *
—
Minutes later, Donk is at the Wales—Morris didn’t mention it by accident last night; he’ll be here. Donk stops at a narrow alley approximately twenty feet long, at the joining of two large wings. At the end of the secluded alley there’s a steel door, locked. Perched above the door, a small camera. Seized with inspiration, Donk sets down the satchel, unzips it, removes two bright red fourteen-pound bowling balls, smooth and sparkling and heavy enough to demolish a grocery window or a cash register. Donk takes the measure of its mass; the man he seeks possesses the strength to hurl this weight with force. Donk doesn’t have such brawn, but he has some skill. He grooves the ball straight down the alley and into the door, where it makes a solid clud-ding noise. He repeats this action with the second ball, then strolls to retrieve them both, strolls back, repeats, repeats. Glares purposefully at the camera perched above the door, as if he knows exactly who’s watching on the other side.
Clud.
Clud. And he thinks of ball and cup, of door and vent. Of Bailey and her quiet little brother Boyd. Clud. And he thinks of Yale. And of the greenhouse. Clud. And he thinks of Ralph, and the things Ralph did. These are the earliest compartments. He thinks of Danny Coyote, only three or four years old, alone day after day for hours in the room as Mommy sleeps, alone all night, sleeping with the lights on as mommy works, or hiding in the cupboard if mommy has been instructed to host a party. She comes home early in the morning and makes him bacon and pancakes from mix and then they go to the bedroom and she holds him for twenty or sixty minutes and talks to him and tells him stories until she starts snoring and then she turns over and Danny goes out to spend his day in the other room. Barely remembering daddy any more, only knowing the absence of him. Yale comes rarely; it’s always an event. He wears a Zoot’s shiny suit. Arms full of presents to ward against complaints of long absence, small talk, laughter, eyes on the clock, eyes on the door. Danny’s intoxicated by him, but he always seems to be gone almost before he’s arrived.
Danny has the ball and cup. The sphere a neon marbled Superball discovered deep in the toe of a smallish Christmas stocking before daddy was gone, the cup a white coffee mug made of concentric loops of ceramic, creating the illusion of something that might be telescoped flat, one large chip out of the mug’s lip like a boxer’s missing tooth. It must have been designed for travel; it’s got something heavy in its base and a rubberized bottom, which makes it perfect for Danny, who sets it against the door and sits cross-legged against the far wall and tosses the ball into the cup. The trick, Danny finds, is hitting the lip where it tub-tub-tub-tub-tub-tub rattles back and forth from side to side, finally coming to rest at the bottom. A long shot. If he can hit it ten times in a row, then daddy will come back, and so will Yale, and Danny won’t be alone all day long. To make the tension go, he lets his hands curl and relax, curl and relax, until he’s calm enough to take the next shot.
For lunch he eats cold bacon and leftover pancake, if they’re there, or else his own hunger if they’re not.
He goes on like this until the day he tragically makes the tenth consecutive shot. On this day, Danny quietly stands up and stays there with his back against the wall for a long time, and though he keeps his face impassive, the longer he stays the angrier he becomes. Only his hands move as he lets his rage build silently within. Very slowly, his hands curl and relax, and curl and relax. Not anymore a releasing action but a gathering one.
Clud.
Clud.
The steel door flies open, revealing a tiny cardinal. Not one Donk’s ever met before; no taller than forty inches, every feature hidden behind a scarlet balaclava hood except for his calm, slow-blinking eyes. “Your boss lost his balls,” Donk says, with a vaguely weary air of practiced indifference, a tone honed through years of conversations with dangerous people. He returns the fourteen-pounders to his satchel. “I thought he might want them back.”
The little cardinal makes a curt gesture with clear meaning—follow—then walks away, back into the Wales. Donk enters; the door bangs shuts behind. He’s self-possessed in a way Donk recognizes; it’s a way of moving shared by Bailey, and by Ralph’s elite killers. This is a man who’s shortened many taller men, one leg at a time. Donk looks back over-shoulder, and nearly shouts. A second tiny cardinal is following them, identical to the one ahead.
Silent, their procession passes unseen through the guts of the hospital: green tiled floors, off-white walls, drop ceiling, fluorescent lighting. Down halls, through doors, by elevator up to the top floor, marching down a long hallway with administrative offices on the left and modular cubical space on the right. At the corner office, the foremost cardinal raps on the door and enters without waiting for an answer. Donk notes the plate hanging on the door—T. IVAN RAGESALAD, MD—this is the office of the JAWPI director; the one who’s in deep shit after the botched release this morning. Ah, the botched release. Releases sometimes botch themselves, Donk thinks, and sometimes they need a bit of help. This one botched just right…sorry, Dr. T. But when the door opens, it’s not Ragesalad in there, but Morris Love, sitting at the doctor’s overlarge desk lit by green-hooded lamps, riffling through the drawers.
“Donkmien’s here,” the lead cardinal announces.
“Thank you, Andrew,” Morris
says, the dismissal clear in his tone. The two tiny cardinals depart as efficiently and silently as they arrived. Morris fishes around in a top drawer, discovers, cuts, and lights a cigar, and draws a few long introductory puffs. “I only allow myself one of these a week,” Morris admits. “But the doctor keeps a good drawer.” He smokes ruminatively, his back to Donk.
“Hi there, boss,” Donk breezes. The informal tone is the correct one—even when you expect trouble, it’s important to assume normal relations, force the other party to turn up the heat—but it’s also why he couldn’t let Bailey tag along—imagine her reaction when she heard the two of you talking familiar. Imagine the connections she’d start to make. And she wouldn’t understand. How could she? She loves you but she’s misunderstood you so badly. She thinks this matter with Ralph is only vengeance. She thinks it’s a question of business completed and final escape. “I like the new office.”
Morris shrugs. “A temporary location, one I have little use for beyond certain patient records I hope to uncover tonight—and it has to be tonight; I certainly don’t expect the previous owner will occupy the space long. Word is he’ll resign first thing Monday, thanks to your efforts. He’s certainly going to resign after what I have planned.”
“Fun stuff. What do you have planned?”
“But you were just about to tell me why I’m not going to have you immediately killed,” says Morris pleasantly, swinging around. “You must have something very useful to tell to risk visiting me less than twelve hours after I warned you off.”
At this, Donk relaxes. His experience is the person least likely to kill you is the one who is telling you they are going to kill you. Only killing is killing—threatening to kill is a play for leverage; it indicates a desire for something other than a fresh corpse.
“Returning your balls,” Donk says, letting the bag slip clud from his shoulder to the floor. Neither of them looks at it.
“Is that all?”
“I made it happen with the loonies this morning, exactly the way you asked. All of them out at once, all the right people bribed to look the other way. I never asked why. I even did it for free. I didn’t expose you to my most trusted people even after your cute stunt last night with these balls. I’m dying for which of those infractions, exactly?”
“You sent a snoop after one of my people, then down my tunnel.”
“I didn’t send him. He’s just good enough to find you himself. A mistake.”
“I’d say a bad mistake.” For the first time Morris’s tone gets sharpish. “I dislike spies.”
“As I said: A mistake.”
“I still haven’t heard a compelling reason for you to leave here alive.”
“We ran a successful operation this morning. I’d like to make our arrangement permanent. I think if I help you find, oh, say…an invisible man, you might be interested in making the hire.”
A low, guttural sound surprises its way from Morris’s throat, and then a deep and poisonous silence fills the room. At length he says, “Don’t move. I want to think about you.”
For long minutes Morris smokes, motionless except for that habit—almost a tic—of glancing over his shoulder. He doesn’t speak until his cigar is half gone, then muses: “I don’t know why I give myself lessons like you, but I can’t seem to stop.” He stands and peers at Donk.
Lessons again. Donk says nothing, but, instinctively, he begins to calibrate a new reality in which he is a lesson, arrived not on his own volition, but instead summoned by another’s. Morris comes closer. “This invisible man. Tell me everything you know about him,” he says.
Here it is. No more teasing; Donk opens his compartment, and his satchel. From it he draws Julius’s newspaper with a green wax rectangle colored onto it, tosses it onto the desk. Not knowing why this artifact will convince; guided only by an instinct that insists it will. “I presume you mean Gordy? Skinny kid? Invisible sometimes? Kind of flickers in and out?”
Donk lets the ensuing silence spread out, then he says: “You see, this is what I can do for y—” but then Morris is right there close god damn he’s fast twisting Donk’s arm horribly behind him pulling his head backward by his hair the bright tip of the lit cigar quivering only an inch from his right eye close enough to feel the heat of it any closer it will fry the cornea without touching and Morris whispers in a bloodless voice: “Tell me everything. Tell me everything.”
This is bad. This is the possibility upon which Bailey has fixated—the part where things go wrong. Morris knows he can’t kill somebody who has the information he needs. But he can take the eyes, lips, teeth, ears, fingers, toes, everything but the tongue. And then there will be no job, no future, no revenge. This man has no desire to retain your services, no inkling he needs them, he wants only the painful extraction of the one piece of information he wants, without appreciation for the skill applied in securing it, or any interest in future applications of that skill. If only Bailey were here. Not to defend you, no. Just to see her one last time…
Instinctively Donk matches his tone to that of his assailant, terrible and calm. “Of course I’ll tell you. I want to tell you.”
“For a job. For your slice of the pie.” The coal is hot and bright.
“I’ll tell you either way. I want to. It’s my purpose. Think of everything I’ve already done for you without gaining advantage.”
“Where.” The coal moves infinitesimally farther away.
“I have reason to believe he’s still here in the hospital.”
“He’s not. We’ve looked.”
“You haven’t looked hard enough.”
“Where in the hospital?” Morris growls.
Donk’s released. Morris steps back away from him and regards him warily. Studies the newspaper, the green rectangle upon it. Donk forces himself to stand back at attention as if nothing has happened. “How do you know this?” Morris asks. Donk hears the same strange slight yet telltale notes of entreaty from earlier tonight—help me because you know why you should. Enough to dare hope he might still finish the day whole and alive.
“I find things out. I’m good at it. It’s what I do for Ralph. Now I want to do it for you.”
Tap-tap-tap goes the cigar, ash on the carpet. “Tell me why I want to find Gordy.”
Donk hesitates. This is an unwelcome question, precisely because he never imagined he’d be asked. Rarely does somebody ask you to provide them with their own motivation. He resorts to the truth. “I don’t know,” he says.
Through Morris’s nose come three of the slightest chuckles imaginable. “Come with me,” he says, walking abruptly out of the office. “You’re so curious about my tunnels anyway. There’s something there you should see.”
As Donk follows, the whole plan suddenly strikes him as absurd—You’ve given away everything; what leverage remains? But no, you know what remains; it’s the desperate choices you already had, the weapons you were willing to bring to Morris even if Boyd had gained no others; they’re the only real advantages you ever had, the cards even Bailey hasn’t realized you’ve hidden up your sleeves: The suicide king, and the Judas kiss.
They pass to the ground level and Morris leads them down beige hallways. At length they enter a darkened cafeteria through double swinging doors. Low tables with molded seats attached line up on either side as they make their way into the kitchen, where stainless steel gleams occasionally in the gloom. Morris walks to a windowless wooden door with a deadbolt and no handle. It opens onto a closet: empty, walls ceiling and floor all done in white. On the opposite wall a bifurcate steel door, which appears to be a service elevator, and, set in the floor, a circular hole with a tight spiral staircase leading down into a well-lit space. Taking the stairs, they find themselves in the cylindrical white tunnel Boyd described. Donk finds it difficult to estimate distances—the tunnel is straight, bright white, and free of any landmark or signifier.
“How far does this go?”
Morris smiles, points. “That way? Hundreds of miles. This way? Much farther.” He strides down the hallway in the direction of “much farther,” still occasionally sneaking a habitual peek over his shoulder. Donk follows, trying not to lose himself in the tunnel’s snowstorm sameness. He’s lost his bearings entirely, but after a while it’s clear to him they’ve gone far beyond the bounds of the Wales. In time, a dark gray spot appears in the distance ahead, which reveals itself as they draw near to be a steel vault door. In the door’s center is inscribed a rectangle showing a narrow red stripe on the top and one on the bottom, and an expanse of white in between. Stamped into the steel below, an insignia:
LOVE FORGEWORKS, LLC
(Flanders Division)
“We’re here,” Morris says. “This way.”
There is, to the left side of the vault door, a doorless entry opening onto a room, as snow-blind white as the tunnel, but carpeted in red, and sparsely appointed with objects—a desk, some chairs, portraits on the walls of a succession of increasingly antiquated-looking men—once again providing Donk’s eye with a much-desired sense of perspective and shape. One object in particular diverts attention from all others: a steel box, the size of a double-wide coffin, resting upon a gurney. Donk is immediately and instinctively repulsed and entranced. Something about its surgical, clinical, precise existence emanates suggestions of unnecessary amputation, of physical invasion, of scalpels effortlessly splitting abdominal fatty layers, making micro-metrically specific compromise of dural sacs and vital membranes, precisely executed excavation of critical internal components, of gleefully witnessed fates worse than death.
Morris watches Donk closely. Donk regards him blandly. “I confess I was surprised to have been approached with an offer of partnership,” Morris says at length. “In a place like this, I expected to fight for position and advantage. But you offered your assistance from the start.”